A frankly alarming new YouGov poll found that 2% of Americans now believe the Earth is flat.

If you’re having trouble accepting this, just search, ‘Flat Earth’ on YouTube, and feel your brain melting as you realise just how many of them there are out there.

But the poll also offered insight into WHY so many people believe the Earth is flat – and it’s all to do with God.

A YouGov poll of 8,215 people in America found that 52% of people believe the Earth is flat consider themselves ‘very religious’ – and say that evidence for the Earth being flat is found in scripture.

Hmmm YouGov.com

YouGov says, ‘For some flat earthers, evidence of the earth’s shape may be found in scripture – more than half of Flat earthers (52%) consider themselves “very religious,” compared to just a fifth of all Americans (20%).

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‘While an overwhelming majority of Americans (84%) believe that the Earth is round, at least 5% of the public say they used to believe that but now have their doubts.

YouGov.com

Flat earthers find traction in their beliefs among a younger generation of Americans. Young millennials, ages 18 to 24, are likelier than any other age group to say they believe the Earth is flat (4%).

Flat Earthers are often quite self-aware about why they believe the Earth is flat – and it’s to do with comfort, one expert has said.

Hmmm Getty

It’s far less scary to believe that we’re on a snow globe created by God than to believe, as Douglas Adams put it, that, ‘we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal.’

‘When they do mention the worldview thing it’s usually kind of an afterthought, or it’s used as justification for the conspiracy element (i.e., the real purpose of the conspiracy is to make us feel like we’re insignificant when we’re really created specially by God).’

In an interview with LiveScience, Wood said, ‘One thing I’ve found interesting in my own adventures on the flat-Earth side of YouTube is, people are often pretty upfront about their motives.

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‘They’ll say that they find it more appalling to believe in the universe as a huge, uncaring place, and that it seems more reasonable to imagine Earth was made for humans like a perfect snow globe.’

Flat Earthers themselves have said almost exactly this – with one contributor to this year’s Flat Earth conference saying that NASA is trying to hide the existence of God.

One speaker, Rob Skiba, revealed something crucial – exactly why NASA is lying to us about the Earth being a globe.

ABC

Skiba – a documentary maker behind such classic films as Archon Invasion: The Rise, Fall and Return of the Nephilim – says, ‘The bigger picture many of us have come to believe is hiding God.

‘To me, that would be the ultimate motivation.

Like many Flat Earthers, Skiba believes the Earth is exactly like it is in the Bible – and NASA and their co-conspirators are trying to conceal this fact.

Skiba says on YouTube that the Bible is, ‘describing a snow globe basically. When you break down the text of what it represents, there’s no way you can get a spinning heliocentric globe out of anything in the Bible.

‘I have become skeptical of everything. And I think rightfully so.’

Andrew Flintoff (Photo by Andrew Benge/Redferns)

Former England cricketer ‘Freddie’ Flintoff revealed late last year that he was obsessed with a podcast called the Flat Earthers – and coming round to their ideas.

Flintoff said, ‘If you’re in a helicopter and you hover why does the Earth not come to you if it’s round?

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‘Why, if we’re hurtling through space, why would water stay still? Why is it not wobbling? Also if you fire a laser about 16 miles, if the world was curved, you shouldn’t be able to see it but you can.’